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In Spring Hill Cemetery in Huntington, West Virginia, a granite stone marks the graves of the parents and some other family members of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the "Father of Black History." The stone stands as mute testimony to the Woodson family's association with the state and to the connection that Dr. Woodson, an internationally known scholar, also had with West Virginia. Among those buried in the family plot are Dr. Woodson's mother and father, Anna Eliza Riddle Woodson and James Henry Woodson, and his sister, Susie. Also buried in the same cemetery, but not in the family plot, are three other of Dr. Woodson's siblings: his sisters Bessie and Cora, and his brother, Robert.
Although Carter G. Woodson was born in Virginia, he migrated to West Virginia, where he spent some formative years. After serving what he termed as a "six years' apprenticeship in the West Virginia coal mines,"1 he finished high school in the state and began his career as a teacher there.
Even after he permanently setded elsewhere and furthered his life's calling as a teacher, researcher, writer and "drum major" for black history, his enduring professional and family connections in West Virginia kept him involved with the state over a long period of time. One brother resided in Beckley. His parents, another brother, and one sister made Huntington their home as did his Aunt Betty, his father's sister, and her husband, Reverend Nelson Barnett, one of the city's pioneering black ministers
Dr. Woodson's parents had been enslaved in Virginia. His mother, Anne Eliza Riddle Woodson in Buckingham County, and his father, James Henry Woodson, in Fluvanna County.2 The couple married in 1867 and eventually became the parents of nine children: William, Cora, Robert, Carter, Susie, Edward, Bessie, and two who did not survive infancy.3
In the 1870s, along with a party of other previously enslaved black people, including the Barnetts, the Woodsons moved to the area of West Virginia that would become Huntington. Lifelong Huntington resident, Edna Smith Duckworth, suggested that this group of the formerly enslaved may have been recruited by C. P. Huntington to help build the C & O Railroad there. She referred to them as the "black pioneers" of Huntington and indicated that they supplied some of...